Take 5 With Don Long

Though he would probably deny it, Don Long is one of the Holy Trinity of dragster builders from the golden age of drag racing. During the mid ’60s through the ’80s, Long, Woody Gilmore, and Kent Fuller were the guys to go to for a rail. To be fair, there were others, such as Frank Huszar, Roy Fjastad (with his Speed Products Engineering), Hal Canode, and many more. But, when it came to wins, high-profile drivers, safety, and performance, you were at a competitive disadvantage without a Long chassis.

Veteran driver Tommy Ivo said his Long dragster was the finest race car he ever owned. Shirley Muldowney says if there is one car she wishes she could have back it’s the Long twin-engine gas dragster built for her and (then-husband) Jack Muldowney in 1969. Besides the 200 front and rear engine dragsters (with a few Gassers and Altereds thrown in), he also built more than 40 Funny Cars based on an incredible chassis jig that his competition scoffed at as “mass produced” and “not tailored to the driver and owner.” But, now all “Big Show” Funny Car chassis are built this way and incorporate many of Long’s innovations. We caught up with Don at the same Gardena shop he’s had since his earliest days of tire haze and nitro in the ’60s.

HRM] In spite of racing during the days of devastating clutch explosions and fatal crashes, you have an unblemished record of no one being killed in your cars. Why?

DL] One of the biggest players in safety is a good handling car. I believe I have the best safety record mostly because my cars handled so well, and they didn’t cut in half because I was putting liners in the clutch cans. When it was known my cars didn’t have clutches coming out, NHRA made the rule to put liners in the [bellhousings]. Mine were the only hardened alloy liners, so when the floater failed it just rubbed on it. Most of the time, the liner could be reused.

HRM] So a dragster that handles well and tracks straight is the key to a safe car?

DL] Of course, and accuracy along with good geometry is what makes them handle well. I have, and still have, the best tooling in the industry. Li’l John Buttera [chassis builder] used to tell me my tooling was more impressive than my chassis. The way I narrow rearends keeps the wheel bearings and carrier bearings highly concentric, and the way I mount the rearend puts it square to the centerline of the chassis. I learned how to do this from my background in geometry. The perpendicular bisector of an isosceles triangle is at a right angle to the short leg. For years, I thought I was the only builder onto this, but recently I read that Scotty Fenn, the early chassis builder who owned Chassis Research, was using the same method. I think most builders just depend on their line-up bar or a straight edge against the back of the block. There are too many variables in those methods for me.

HRM] How did you know what worked and what didn’t?

DL] There’s no easy answer to that. It’s all a big, dynamic symphony; it’s all chaotic. It’s science, evolution, and trial and error. I try to build chassis so weight shift and aero downforces are balanced with the energy put to the rear tires. The pursuit of speed and safety are in conflict. Anytime you add speed you better consider safety. For safety, there is no answer -- only opinions. You can’t design a chassis for a crash if you don’t know the crash ahead of time. Show me how it’s going to crash, and I’ll design you a chassis.

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HRM] To design and build dragsters and Funny Cars for as long as you did, did it take a mechanical engineering degree or what?

DL] My background is as a design draftsman in the defense industry. When I was young I was a good student and got straight As -- until I got a girlfriend. Out of high school, I was hired as a draftsman and worked with all sorts of engineers. I learned a lot from the stress engineers, metallurgists, and aerodynamicists. I was either smart or lucky enough to hang around these people so when I had a problem I could go to them for answers—especially when the answer wasn’t in a book. I still have a large circle of intellectual friends that help me, but my drinking friends are still drag racers.

HRM] What key development in dragster evolution are you most known for?

DL] I think I was the wheelbase guy -- my cars were most often longer than my competition, which in those days was Woody Gilmore for the most part, and I don’t think I would have worked so hard if it weren’t for the rivalry between us. I found that the longer the cars got, the straighter they ran and the better the front end stayed down. I wanted to be careful not to build one so long that it was a freak, so I just sneaked into it. Later, I learned about the principle of “angular acceleration.” [Think of this as holding a bat at the knob versus choking up it. -- TT] This principle tells us a car that is twice as long as another, with all other things being equal, is not twice but four times more resistant to wheelstands. It explains why a dragster will always beat a Funny Car.

Let’s say a dragster is 200 pounds lighter than a Funny Car. If you put 200 pounds on the dragster, it will still whip the Funny Car even though it has more drag. How do you explain that? It’s because the dragster, due to its wheelbase, is more resistant to wheelstands, allowing its weight distribution to favor traction. In the words of my old friend, the late Ed Donovan, “It’s not how long you make it, it’s how you make it Long.”

Guys like me that want to improve and come up with a new mousetrap don’t have a place anymore.

HRM] Were your dragsters the lightest? How did you balance that with safety?

DL] I put a huge effort into saving weight. I did things nobody had done, like washing the oil out of the inside of the tubing to save an ounce or two. Does that make the car any less safe? No. I drilled big vent holes inside the tubing intersections instead of little vent holes. Does that make the car less safe? No. I telescoped the tubing where the rollbars were attached, way before it became a rule. That added a little weight but a whole lot of safety.

I would reduce the size of everything (or even eliminate some things completely) to save weight -- but not to the point of what I perceived as being unsafe. We weighed our chassis, and I was confident mine were always lighter. Woody might have been checking to see if mine were lighter [laughs], but I never checked his. The lightest chassis I ever built was in 1967. It weighed 68 pounds with a 175-inch wheelbase. It was a gas car that gained fame as the Adams and Enriquez Jr. Fueler. I built a lot of fuel cars with 185-inch wheelbase that weighted 85-90 pounds.

HRM] Around 1969–’70, you added Funny Cars. Most builders tend to be all dragsters or all Funny Cars. You did both equally well.

DL] When the Funny Cars came around, I figured I could build a lot of them with good tooling and some extra help. Without good tooling, you have to be a good craftsman. With good tooling, almost anyone could do it. I was too busy to build them, along with all the dragsters I had on order, so I needed some good help. Fortunately for me, a nearby sheetmetal shop was closing, and their best employee was available. His name was Ronny Richards, and he was a superb welder, machinist, and sheetmetal man. Together, we built a very accurate Funny Car jig and followed up with 30 to 40 chassis.

HRM] How did they stack up against the competition?

DL] They were the best in the industry by far. You could swap bodies or take a part off of one and put it on another. They were affordable because we could produce a lot. They were really different from the others. My definition of a chassis is a piece that holds the essentials together. The most efficient chassis is going to be the lightest. With the new jig, we produced the lightest chassis ever, mostly because of its simple layout. We came up with improvements like how the body was mountable in height and preload with no additional weight. When you look at today’s chassis, they’re pretty much the same design. Mine was the grandfather.

HRM] And they were a huge success?

DL] No. The first chassis went to Pete Everett. Pete’s driver was Leroy “Doc” Hales, and Leroy drove the car into the wall at Long Beach on the first run. He was supposed to make an easy run and shut off early, but he just full-throttled it and got in over his head. Back then, a few experienced drivers would make a full pass with a new car, and I think Leroy wanted to do the same. Some of my competitors took advantage of what happened and [criticized] my chassis. The next car went to Mart Higgenbothem, and it did very well but was somewhat out of the spotlight. Then we built one for Joe Pisano that he ran once or twice, then told the world that it didn’t work. That same car was bought from Pisano by Jim Green and won the championship -- the Green Elephant Vega was the NHRA Winternationals runner-up in 1974 and 1975, and won the ’73 NHRA Funny Car World Championship with Frank Hall driving, as well as ’73 Division 6 FC Championship. The Hales and Pisano incidents pulled the carpet out from under the Funny Car sales. We only built 30 to 40 of them. They were great cars, and in a way I get the last laugh because today the “Big Show” Funny Car chassis are built on a jig similar to mine. They’ve got interchangeable parts exactly like we tried to do in 1970.

HRM] Throughout this time, tire shake was a big problem?

DL] Oh God, tire shake, it was horrible. We were doing a lot of repairs because cars were breaking so much and in places they’d never broken before. They would break behind the engine on both dragsters and Funny Cars, and on dragsters around the rearend where it mounted to the lower framerail. We tried more diagonal trussing, but it didn’t help much. One time, the rear engine Cerny-Moody car came in and the top rail was broken all the way through. Sometime after that, Gary Rupp came along and wanted a dragster without all the additional trussing. I said, “OK,” and his chassis life seemed to improve. So the evolution was to make the chassis looser instead of more rigid and heavier -- same with the wing mounts. At that time, those with the more flexible mounts had fewer problems than those with the more rigid ones. That’s also the time when the hose clamps were used to retain the motor mounts -- the solid mounts were just too rigid.

3/4

HRM] You didn’t try the flexible chassis like Woody was experimenting with. Why?

DL] The chassis of Ed Pink’s Old Master was sort of a flexible one, and a few other early ones were, too. I got away from that because I felt the frame should be a rigid body, and the suspension is where movement gets taken up. The flex should be in the springs because you get into fatigue when you start bending the tubing. Woody started the flex thing with saddles, and I’ve got to say today’s fuelers are “flexi-flyers.” Not exactly like Woody’s, today there is no suspension, and the chassis movement is obtained by not trussing the forward bays. They do fatigue and crack, so they replace them. It’s a consumable chassis today.

You can’t design a chassis for a crash, if you don’t know the crash ahead of time.

HRM] What about independent suspensions on dragsters?

DL] To me, an independent suspension was just unnecessary motion and weight. I always wanted to keep things simple and light so I never went there.

HRM] When you transitioned to rear-engine dragsters, did you see it coming?

DL] No, I can’t say I did; but it was great for business. I enjoyed building the rear-engine cars equally, or more, because I was getting into building more accurate tooling. The Funny Car jig was awesome, so I built a similar one for the rear-engine dragsters. Dragster number 66 was the first rear-engine one, number 67 was a front engine, and then from 68 on, they were all rear-engine. It changed just like that.

HRM] Do you have any favorite cars or customers?

DL] There were several “House Cars” that we built, and I guess they were my favorites mostly because I got to try new ideas. I was very careful not to try new things on cars that were not close to me. As far as customers go, I built chassis for most of the top names: Prudhomme, Shirley, Ivo, Ruth, Donovan -- but never any for Garlits. Garlits always built his own, some thirty-something of them. Most of my customers got it right on the second or third try [laughs].

HRM] Why did you get out of building dragsters?

DL] I ask myself that, and it’s a hard question. Unlike Tom Hanna and so many others that were into drag racing, then out of it, then back in it again, I stayed in it, and I guess it just ran its course. Another reason is the leadership has taken drag racing in a direction I’m not fond of. They no longer have room for a new mousetrap. Anybody’s new idea is almost immediately eliminated—we’re not wanted nowadays. So guys like me that want to improve and come up with a new mousetrap don’t have a place anymore. Bonneville is the only motorsport that is actually growing, and it’s growing by leaps and bounds. Why? They welcome innovation. Bonneville is the drag racer’s last train robbery.

HRM] But, you’re still building cars and making parts.

DL] I want to retire. I want to go fishing. I’m 74, and all those years of welding have scarred my arms, weakened my eyes, and damaged my lungs. It’s time to spend more time with my family. I have two daughters, and for all the praises and awards I’ve received, the best thing I have ever done is work with my wife, Pauline, to get those girls into prosperous adulthood. I’ve got three beautiful grandchildren.

There are three more restoration projects ahead of me, and then I’d like to close up shop and retire. I guess there’s a chance that if something really cool came in I would change my mind, but I turn down work now.

HRM] In 2010, you received the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Hot Rod Reunion in Bakersfield. You broke up the crowd.

DL] When I received the award, I thanked all the racers that bought my cars and ran hard for their own causes because they made me look good. I thanked Woody, [builder Kent] Fuller, [body maker Tom] Hanna, and Steve Gibbs and Greg Sharp both from the NHRA Museum. When I thanked Hanna, I told the crowd his work was so outstanding that it could almost make a Garlits chassis look good. That joke got a good laugh, but the best laugh came when I thanked my wife, Pauline. I told the story about her and I, back in the ’60s, when I was working real hard and putting in so much time. She questioned why I was working so hard, so I told her that someday I would get an outstanding award and she would have her answer. “Yeah,” she replied, “When there’s a black man in the White House, you will.”

Built With Math to Go Fast

Don Long built 200 dragsters and 40 Funny Cars from the mid 60s through the ’80s. Many won national events or were first to reach certain elapsed-time or top-speed thresholds.

Two builders who influenced Long were Kent Fuller and Don Weddle. He says both were good at “balancing form and function.” Says Long, “They were very clever men and I learned a lot from them.”

HOT ROD made three revisions of this article because Long believes in the “C-Model Theory,” where anything can be refined to a higher level after its second, or “B” iteration, to around 90 percent or better on its third or “C” version. Long says anything refined to 100 percent means those involved are crazy. There are no crazy people at HOT ROD.